Main Cast: Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte, Barbara Hershey, Glenne Headly
Release Year: 1999
Country: US
Run Time: 110 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
In a small American town called Midland City, Dwayne Hoover (Bruce Willis) -- a loyal father, a successful car dealer, and a respected member of the community --lives with his wife Celia (Barbara Hershey), who's addicted to pills and TV shows, and his son Bunny (Lukas Haas), who is a weakling. What's more, his best friend and employee Harry Le Sabre (Nick Nolte) is a paranoid red-lace-lingerie fetishist. Dwayne finds short-term consolation in the arms of his secretary and mistress, Francine (Glenne Headley). As the American Dream slowly becomes his nightmare, Hoover begins to retreat into a fantasy world, filled with strange voices and fearful visions. It takes only the arrival of third-rate science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney) -- whose novels are turned into fourth-rate porno comics -- at the Midland City Art Festival for things to explode. Hoover's only hope is Kilgore, whom he has raised to the status of a guru in his fantasies. However, the two men meet when time, space, and reality have already lost their meaning. Now it is only nonsense that makes sense and madness that reigns; the American dream has turned into lunacy. Breakfast of Champions, which had its world premiere during the 49th International Berlin Film Festival in 1999, is the outcome of a project in the making for over twenty years. Director Alan Rudolph wrote the script when the novel by Kurt Vonnegut was first published. However, it took all this time (and perhaps the casting of someone like Bruce Willis in order to get it financed) for the project to be realized. ~ Gönül Dönmez-Colin, All Movie Guide
Lukas Haas - Bunny Hoover; Omar Epps - Wayne Hoobler; Buck Henry - Fred T. Barry; Vicki Lewis - Grace Le Sabre; Ken Campbell - Eliot Rosewater/Gilbert; Jake Johannsen - Bill Bailey; Will Patton - Moe; Chip Zien - Andy Wojeckowzski; Owen Wilson - Monte Rapid; Alison Eastwood - Maria Maritmo; Shawnee Smith - Bonnie MacMahon; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Commercials Director
Credit
Randy Eriksen - Art Director, Sandra Tomita - Associate Producer, Pam Dixon - Casting, Rudy Dillon - Costume Designer, Cara Giallanza - First Assistant Director, Alan Rudolph - Director, Suzy Elmiger - Editor, Mark Isham - Composer (Music Score), Nina Ruscio - Production Designer, Elliot Davis - Cinematographer, David Blocker - Producer, David Willis - Producer, Eliza Paley - Sound/Sound Designer, Paul Soucek - Sound/Sound Designer, Alan Rudolph - Screenwriter, Janet Muswell - Visual Effects Supervisor, K.C. Fox - Set Decorator, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Book Author
Bruce Willis stars as Dwayne Hoover, a car dealer who is quickly losing touch with himself and reality. Albert Finney plays science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a character who appears in several of Vonnegut's other stories. Nick Nolte plays Dwayne's cross-dressing business associate Harry LeSabre. Omar Epps is cast as Wayne Hoobler, a jailbird attempting to work on Dwayne's lot.
Lukas Haas makes a cameo as Bunny, Dwayne's homosexual son, who, in the novel, plays piano in the lounge at the Holiday Inn. For legal reasons, in the film Bunny instead plays at the AmeriTel Inn.
Kurt Vonnegut makes a one-line cameo as a TV commercial director.
Vonnegut's reaction
At the close of the Harper Audiobook edition of Breakfast of Champions, there is brief conversation between Vonnegut and long-time friend and attorney, Donald C. Farber in which the two, among jokes, disparage this loose film adaptation of the book as "painful to watch."[1]
Critical Reception
Breakfast of Champions received negative reviews, scoring a 25% on Rotten Tomatoes. In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, "In many ways, Breakfast of Champions is an incoherent mess. But it never compromises its zany vision of the country as a demented junkyard wonderland in which we are all strangers groping for a hand to guide us through the looking glass into an unsullied tropical paradise of eternal bliss."[2]Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "F" rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "Rudolph, in an act of insane folly, seems to think that what matters is the story. The result could almost be his version of a Robert Altman disaster - a movie so unhinged it practically dares you not to hate it."[3] In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Peter Stack wrote, "Rudolph botches the material big time. Relying on lame visual gimmicks that fall flat, and insisting on pushing almost every scene as frantic comedy weighted by social commentary, he forces his actors to become hams rather than believable characters."[4]Sight and Sound magazine's Edward Lawrenson wrote, "Willis' performance, all madness, no method, soon feels embarrassingly indulgent."[5] In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas wrote, "As it is, Breakfast of Champions is too in-your-face, too heavily satirical in its look, and its ideas not as fresh as they should be. For the film to have grabbed us from the start, Rudolph needed to make a sharper differentiation between the everyday world his people live in and the vivid world of their tormented imaginations."[6] In her review for the Village Voice, Amy Taubin wrote, "Another middle-aged male-crisis opus, it begins on a note of total migraine-inducing hysteria, which continues unabated throughout."[7]
Welcome to the Monkey House (1970, 1974) ·Sirens of Titan (1974) ·Cat's Cradle (1976) ·God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1979) ·Breakfast of Champions (1984) ·Requiem (Stone, Time, and Elements: A Humanist Requiem) (1988) ·Slaughterhouse-Five (1996)
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